What is the purpose of education? Every single person will have a different answer. Is it to prepare students for “the real world?” Is it to teach kids discipline? Is it to foster the one-of-a-kind intelligence and skills each young person has?
Well, here is what I know. When students go to school every day, we are prepared for the real world—not by learning calculus but by our own community at school. We are prepared by facing difficult challenges in our personal life, then going to school and still making it work. The truth is that our real world is not solving MC squared but it is paying taxes, paying bills and supporting yourself. All of which the typical school does not teach.
When we go to school, we learn discipline, in a sense. We learn that girls cannot show their shoulders or wear shorts above their knees because “boys will be boys.” We learn to be silent and do what we are told. We are rewarded for sitting quietly through lessons glorifying colonization and not saying anything even though it doesn’t feel right. We learn discipline by being expelled or suspended for our mistakes, only to go back to our classrooms run by teachers who are not held accountable for their actions or decisions.
Schools reflect on the inside of what happens on the outside. We see our neighbors, dads, brothers get racially profiled in the outside world, we see the exact same behavior on the inside. A study reported by the New York Post found that, ”African-American students are nearly four times as likely to be suspended from school as Caucasians.” To paint this picture more clearly, The Child Defense organization found that in 2017, a Latino student gets suspended every nine seconds and a Black student every six seconds.
Women are degraded, objectified and mistreated in our communities just as we see them in schools. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 1 in 5 undergraduate females are sexually assaulted during their college career. Schools in the nicer part of town can get more resources than the ones in the hood. Our schools are separated by race just as the neighborhoods of our city are. A white kid using hate speech won’t get suspended but if a Black student wears a hoodie in the wrong teacher’s class, they get sent home to change.
We need to take advantage of the way our schools reflect society. When the outside world is too much to change, we must start small, from the inside, and create change in our schools. As schools and the education students receive starts to shift, graduates change their community as they reflect their education. I see this in my peers around me and I know it from first-hand experience.
When a student likes to go to school, their lives improve on all facets. As they are, most schools force their students into a box. If you cannot fit into the box then “school isn’t for you” and students are left to slip through the cracks. If you can’t be who schools are designed for, “you’re the problem,” which only perpetuates the school to prison pipeline and teaches youth that we aren’t enough. Even as a student with a 4.0 GPA, I understand that the knowledge and experiences I have gained outweigh, without question, the importance of any grade point average.
The students who get all As, the teacher’s pet, the student who does great under pressure and can take five advanced placement classes a semester, “That student is working hard,” they say…but really that student is the exact image of what people want to see on the outside. In a capitalistic society, we value the person who does their job, and does it regardless of a presence of joy, someone who doesn’t ask questions. We shame the person who thinks outside of the box, doesn’t fit in the box, and actively refuses to stay in a box.
It is time we change the way we see education. We need to believe education can be something better. An education where we foster the one-of-a-kind intelligence and skills each young person has. Understand that education should be healing instead of convincing so many of us that our version of knowledge is not good enough. I see this within my own city of San Francisco. Select schools in my district have more prestige, privileges and resources than the one I will graduate from. Be that as it may, I believe I got a better education then the ones given at those schools.
We need to believe education can be something better.
The education all students deserve is not an unattainable wish. It exists, but it is not accessible to every student. As a graduating senior from June Jordan School for Equity, I can look back at my four years of high school and say that it has been impactful. My lessons learned in the classroom followed me into my personal life and I still see the impact it has had on me grow more each day.
Learning to love school did not come from the outdated school system, but it came from the teachers that make a difference. All students deserve an opportunity to receive that kind of education. Not just the straight A students, not just students who have economic and racial privilege, not just the students that fit in the box, but every student who sits in a classroom ready to learn.